ozymandiax

It's bizarre that a 1960 computer can run a port of the Z machine, and run most of the Infocom adventures. All on primitive drum storage.

A page introducing Bill Ezell's pidp1-mods. Bill spent a year on building everything needed for the 'ultimate hacker's PDP-1'. That meant building all sorts of peripherals into the PDP-1 simulator. Developing a modern, gcc based development toolchain to suit modern-day hackers. And allowing people to build their own hardware for the P(i)DP-1. Be that virtual hardware in simulation, or real, modern day Maker hardware through an I2C port.

Then, staying within the hardware limits of this 1960 machine, he ported first Adventure from the PDP-10, then, the Z Machine. So you can now play Beyond Zork on a VT-100 terminal, through a faithfully simulated 64-serial port interface (Type 630) on a PDP-1, using drum storage to hold the data.

It might be esoteric, but if you care for ancient computer history, this is an amazing playground.

Note - no need to own the PiDP-1 hardware. This will run on any Linux with a virtual PDP-1 front panel included.

Thanks, Bill!

Incredible project! It would be amazing to have this machine up and running, I never thought that would even be possible. I wonder about your electricity bills though :-)

Apple might sue you though, like they did DRI :-)

This rewrites what-could-have-been history a bit... better get my IBM XT/286 out of storage! Is this for real?

From Computerphile - nice insight in the guts of Lisp from the IBM 704 and PDP-6 Lisp. Software archaeology can be insightful :-)

This famous 'hacker OS' was the birthplace of rather a lot - emacs, AI living in a 3D world, as well as the Open Source culture. A reconstruction project has brought it back to life. It's fun to experience what it was like circa 1973, having a heavyweight PDP-10 mainframe class machine hacked on for fun and exploration.

The software used in the Computerphile episode can run on any Pi - and, in fact, any Linux - without the replica hardware.

I hope this gets some attention to an OS right at the root of what we're living with day to day now!

A practical tip that works miracles on 5.25 diskettes: rub their edges against a table top or whatever, making them sit looser in their sleeves. Does miracles to disks that cause read errors - strange as it sounds.

Also, using an 80 track drive to read a 40 track disk works most of the time. But if you get any read errors, trying with a 40 track drive solves a lot of them!

Lastly, have multiple drives. A read error on one drive might not be a problem on another drive.

I recovered more than a thousand floppies some years ago. And learned that read errors in most cases are not irrecoverable. Try another drive, rub the diskette's edges - the two things that fixed most problems.

Wow! How did I manage to miss this treasure trove! Thank you.